Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012

In the twenty-first century, international borders are being rethought and remade after the concept of a 'borderless world' of the 1990s lost its promise. This article looks at some of the ways in which borders have recently been re-conceptualized and framed through case studies of two museological projects: the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas and the Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. As abstract, conceptual phenomena, geographical borders pose a representational quandary that is addressed not only through state strategies of demarcation and surveillance, but also through soft power and the strategies of architectural and museological display that bolster popular support for, and lend meaning to, the abstraction of a line.

This article examines the variant of remembering exhibitions that adopts a documentary approach rather than attempting to replicate, riff on, or reprise the remembered exhibition. Case studies focus on examples that remember more than one exhibition. Discussions of Stationen der Moderne, Telling Histories, Parallel Chronologies, L'Attico and Recollections present the interplay between their celebratory functions and political import in relation to institutional, geographic and temporal considerations. In addition, the archival remembering exhibition is positioned in relation to the archive as it appears in recent contemporary art exhibition practices.

In a self-critical inquiry into my own recent work of co-curating and the experience of seeing my video work being curated by others, this article examines acts of framing as performative acts that seek to transform visitors' preconceptions. This affective effect is pursued by means of immersion, where the balance between documentary and fiction, as well as that between guidance and self-determination, are key instruments. The analysis of the relationship between artist, writer, curator and museum staff on the one hand, and visitors on the other, clarifies to what extent curatorial acts are collective and dialectic. These issues will be broached in connection to the exhibition Landscapes of Madness in the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum in Turku, Finland.

Konstrukcja w Procesie/Construction in Process featured work by 54 international artists in an abandoned nineteenth-century textile factory in Łódź, Poland in 1981. It was a curious, multi-layered exhibition that brought together unresolved politics, a curatorial method of 'sorting out' or 'arranging for', and a bohemian approach to life and art that looked back to the European avant-gardes of the 1930s. This article aims to reveal that, via the organizers' collaboration with Solidarity, the exhibition not only rejected the political bodies in power, but strove to articulate a proposal for an altogether new socio-political reality.

Scholars agree that Edgar Degas considered establishing a museum or donating his art collection to the French nation, but ultimately abandoned the idea. This article argues that while Degas never intended to found an official museum, his three-storey quarters that he arranged at 37 rue Victor-Massé functioned as an independent 'artist's house' or maison-musée typical of this modernist genre of display. Included were the artist's studio, his dwelling quarters and private museum, all curated by the artist himself. Like the autonomous group exhibitions of 1874–1886, of which Degas had been a main organizer, his domestic displays mark an important example of exhibition space in the context of modern French artists' resistance to state-run exhibition policy and art institutions.

STUCK UP: A SELECTED HISTORY OF ALTERNATIVE & POP CULTURE TOLD THROUGH STICKERS Curated by DB Burkeman, first exhibited at SCOPE Art Fair, Miami, FL, 29 November–4 December 2011. Traveling to Maxwell Colette Gallery, Chicago, IL, 20 January–3 March 2012; 323East Gallery, Royal Oak, MI, 24 March–15 April 2012; U.G.L.Y. Gallery, New Bedford, MA, 21 April–4 May 2012; and other venues.

STICKERS: FROM PUNK ROCK TO CONTEMPORARY ART, DB BURKEMAN, WITH MONICA LOCASCIO New York: Rizzoli (2010), 300 pp., ISBN 978-0-7893-2081-0, Paperback, US$35.00

SANJA IVEKOVIĆ: SWEET VIOLENCE Curated by Roxana Marcoci, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 18 December 2011 – 26 March 2012

RECOLLECTIONS, PARTI: BEWOGEN BEWEGING (1961) AND DYLABY (1962) Curated by Margriet Schavemaker, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/Temporary Stedelijk 2, 3 March–8 July 2011

THE JEALOUS CURATOR Blogger, Danielle Krysa, www.thejealouscurator.com/blog/, 2009–date

ART FAG CITY Editorial Director, Paddy Johnson, www.artfagcity.com/, 2005–date

THE FUTURE OF TRADITION – THE TRADITION OF FUTURE: 100 YEARS AFTER THE EXHIBITION MASTERPIECES OF MUHAMMADAN ART IN MUNICH, CHRIS DERCON, LEÓN KREMPEL AND AVINOAM SHALEM (EDS) Munich/London: Haus der Kunst/Prestel (2010), ISBN 978-3-7913-5085-1, 128 pp., Hardback, US$49.95

RETHINKING CURATING: ART AFTER NEW MEDIA, BERYL GRAHAM AND SARAH COOK Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2010), 376 pp., ISBN 978-0-262-01388-8, Hardback, US$34.95

CURATING ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY, SARAH CHAPLIN AND ALEXANDRA STARA (EDS) London and New York: Routledge (2009), 272 pp., ISBN10: 0-415-48983-0, Paperback, US$53.95

EXHIBITIONISM: A SYMPOSIUM ON QUEER CURATORIAL PRACTICES Organized by John David Rhodes and Pawel Leszkowicz. Sponsored by the Centre for Visual Fields and the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change at the University of Sussex, and the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. Held at the Old Courthouse, Brighton, UK, 16 November 2011.

BEYOND THE WHITE CUBE? AUSSTELLUNGS ARCHITEKTUR, RAUMGESTALTUNG UND INSZENIERUNG HEUTE Symposium organized by Diana Brinkmeyer, Anke Kugelmann, Christina Landbrecht and Philip Norten, Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum fr Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin, 25 March 2011